OpenOffice abandoned by Telstra

Australia’s biggest ISP, Telstra BigPond has dumped OpenOffice from its free download area in favour of its own office software. Officially the company is citing 'business reasons' for the removal. In fact, BigPond Office is a competitor with OpenOffice.

The move has angered a lot of Open Source customers who say that BigPond Office is only useful for people who want to access their documents from different machines. It is no where near as good as Microsoft Office or OpenOffice and is a closer competitor to Google Docs.

We would have thought that those who wanted to download OpenOffice would have no problem doing so from other sites. Why they are fuming so much because one site does not have the free software is not explained.

Some blogs are refering to Telstra as trampling on the Open Source industry and its actions will result in the movement being treated with suspicion, which might be taking things a bit far.